


Servility

by thatgaywizard



Series: Wingrove/Harchester [6]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016), Supernatural
Genre: (actually I don't think either know the word moderate when it comes to alcohol), Billy is slightly ooc because he's older in this, Crying, Heavy Angst, M/M, Pain, Some pining, both of them cry, hurt comfort, lOveMakiNg???, light alcohol use, purgatory the upside down and the empty are all interlinked, show crossover, tortured souls converge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-21
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:08:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26030902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatgaywizard/pseuds/thatgaywizard
Summary: Billy is trapped in purgatory until Dean helps him escape and they find respite in the bunker alone together while they figure out how to cope with fractured pieces of their lives.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/ Billy Hargrove, Harchester, Wingrove - Relationship
Series: Wingrove/Harchester [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1651864
Kudos: 11





	Servility

  
They stumbled back and sat down roughly on the sidewalk as the searing sound of the rift sizzled and lashed and seemed to be sucked away until it was a tiny hole made of blue flame and then it was gone. The silence was deafening. The world was too bright around them suddenly like all the gray had been flushed away in a technicolor tide. Billy had to move and make some sort of noise to convince himself he hadn’t gone deaf. They got up and Dean grasped him by the arm and Billy put his hands on Dean’s shoulder in a daze, needing to steady themselves although everything was still.

Dean took them back to the place he called something like home. They shuffled into the partially underground lair, finally able to let their guard down, finally able to stop moving, but Billy felt as lost as ever. They were both exhausted and filthy. He didn’t think he had slept more than five hours in the last three days. 

“Well,” his companion said in a voice that sounded like it had lately been exhumed, “we made it.” But the tone he used wasn’t the tone of someone victorious. He sounded defeated and worn bone deep, like the last survivor on a battlefield. 

“Thanks to you,” Billy told him, trying to keep some semblance of encouragement in the bleak moment. 

They had nothing with them but the clothes on their back and those were ruined ten times over. Dean looked at the wooden chair in the long foyer in front of them as if he wanted to sit down but Billy could see in his face that he wasn’t going to let himself do it yet and he was pretty sure he understood why. If he sat down now he didn’t think he would be able to get up again any time soon. 

“Kitchens that way, bedrooms that way.” Dean pointed to the left and then right and then gave another uninspired motion in the same direction as an afterthought- “Bathrooms.” He walked away towards what was supposedly the kitchen and Billy followed down a small flight of well polished wooden steps and into a long corridor. Dean went into a room on the left. Inside an island counter stood nearly center while the walls were covered with a mixture of army base style shelves and very minimalist modern looking racks. It was very clearly the kitchen, but more in the style of a restaurant than a house.

Dean flicked on the lights and went straight to the fridge. He took out a bottle of water and inhaled the whole thing never pausing for a breath.

Billy watched him do this. Watched as Dean's hand pressed to the silver fridge door and his head tipped back, his eyes pinched shut so that the stain of dirt across his skin could be seen in the lines at their corners. He watched Dean's throat work with a bodily feeling as one small streak of water slid down the side of the man's jaw and quickly trickled down his neck. The feeling in Billy was something like lust but hungrier... just desperate thirst maybe, but for more than he could take in right now. He trudged over to the fridge as Dean finished off the plastic bottle and let it fall onto the counter. He had the consideration to retrieve one from the fridge for Billy as well which Billy downed without hesitation in a similar fashion. Their appetite for food was strangely dampened in comparison however but they ate mechanically because they had been surviving off things he didn’t want to ever think about again. 

Dean never spoke another word to him that evening. He retrieved a bottle of whiskey from somewhere in a cabinet and disappeared into one of the bedrooms, taking off his shirt on the way and throwing it on the ground in the hallway before he was gone. Billy could still see the claw marks across the middle of his back from a werewolf some handful of days prior. He found an empty room next to the one Dean had sequestered himself in. It had everything he needed currently. Namely: a bed. The thought of sleeping now without bathing, although they had certainly gone without it night after night, was unbearable and he forced himself half conscious and near delusional through the motions of getting undressed and under running water. The clean water alone rejuvenated him in a way nothing less than sleep could have, and he was able to get into bed without thinking, seeing only the endless pattern of gray back-lit trees beneath his eyelids, and smelling nothing.

He had no idea how long he slept when he heard Dean’s gruff voice calling his name...no, it was more of a whisper than a call, but it was hard to tell when he was half dead. He tried to respond with an actual word but he didn’t think it came out as anything intelligible. And then he remembered _Dean,_ and keeping watch, and the creatures- and nearly threw himself out of bed in alarm before noticing he was indoors. He squinted to see the figure in his doorway. 

“So you are alive,” Dean said.

Billy had to consider the comment seriously. He must have made some sort of sound.

“Just checkin.” Dean started to walk away.

“What time is it?” Billy asked.

“You mean what _day_ is it?” Dean sounded a lot more perky than he had last time Billy had talked to him. “Probably like five o'clock.”

That was roughly the time they had arrived at the bunker. At least that was what he had thought. “Like, tomorrow five o clock?” There was a hint of panic in Billy’s voice.

“Uh, yeah. No. It’s five o clock tomorrow.” 

Billy closed his eyes again and felt the pillow beneath him, realizing again that it felt amazing. Comparatively. 

“Anyway, didn't wanna wake you. Just makin sure you're good,” Dean said before walking away leaving Billy there in the quiet, windowless, submarine depth of the room. He could have definitely slept more but he was curious now that he was up. He had no desire to see or understand anything last night, he had only wanted to sink into unconscious oblivion- _dreamless_ oblivion, miracle of all miracles, he had somehow got his wish.

After they had escaped purgatory they had both been so ragged he hadn’t been able to care about where they were, but now that his brain and body had recovered somewhat, the desire _to know_ returned. He hadn’t. Hadn’t _wanted_ to know. At some point the bleak desolation of some demonic realm and torment became too much, the fighting, the surviving, the running, and the killing...it all became too much for the average human mind and he- they- had started to function on a lower base level. An animal level. And that would have been logical, would have been something a person could come to terms with but the added layer of whatever invasive mind parasite… it was too much. He wasn't sure how he was even now forming coherent normal thoughts again… assuming this was real.

They were alone in what Dean called “the bunker” and he learned that this was his base of operations more or less. Dean had a life Billy hadn’t imagined, a weird one, by the sound of it. He had only known him in Purgatory as a soldier, a fighter, just as lost as Billy was. From what Dean had told him he knew about monsters back in his world, the same world as Billy’s from what they could deduce. He knew nothing more about him besides that he had a plethora of strange knowledge and ended up in that place through similarly bizarre means, but Billy was lucky that he had met him because Dean had the way out. Billy would have never found it on his own. 

He put on a pair of jeans that he found in the room and didn’t bother looking for a shirt. He couldn’t even tell if it was cold or warm, his body had grown used to the drastically ever changing weather of the other realm. He found Dean back in the kitchen sitting at the short wooden table with an empty plate in front of him and a not very empty liquor bottle. He looked far, far, away. Billy could still see the predator stillness in him, his focus on something behind his eyes and beyond this world. 

Billy could have dwelt on it, the soul burning weariness of going and going...and going and going, until time became a stranger to him, but he was still adrift and right now he had to be at peace with that or lose his mind which hadn’t been his own for too long already. 

The gray concrete steps were smooth and cool beneath his bare feet as Billy stepped down into the galley. He sat on one of the small round stools attached to the table cross-ways from Dean. Everything in this place looked antique and also somehow new. Polished and preserved, but practical. Steel bar shelves sat against the center island with pots and bowls. He hadn’t noticed the strange white doors built into the wall last night. They looked like they were probably part of a freezer.

Dean acknowledged him with a glance.

“Breakfast of champions,” Billy said looking at the bottle.

“It’s almost dinner time, Sleeping Beauty,” Dean told him in his deeply colorless monotone.

“That’s right. I forgot we were underground.” 

Dean wasn’t much for conversation but neither was Billy. They sat in companionable silence for a while as they had many nights in Purgatory until eventually Billy whispered, “I’m still not even sure if this is real...” He felt the incredible pallid stillness one found on the underside of emotion, down near the bottom, the flatline that came after prolonged turmoil, when what was terrible all became matter of fact and you could no longer be sad or anxious about it. There was a peace to it. A brutalist peace, not a soft one.

Dean’s heavy gaze settled on him and tugged at Billy like an anchor. “I’ve been down that road. It does not go anywhere. _This_. This is real. You gotta believe that.” After a moment he directed Billy’s gaze to the stove top. “You should eat something.” 

Now that he mentioned it, Billy was starving, and Dean it turned out wasn’t the worst cook ever. Despite his comment about dinner he must have woken up not very long ago himself because the food he had made was entirely breakfast.

“Yeah,” Billy said a few minutes later, like he had been considering it earlier and had just received the confirmation after clearing the stove top, “food is fucking good.” It got a small laugh out of Dean which brought some warmth into the moment for the first time.

Dean was fully dressed, whether for a reason or simply because he felt like it, a faded red and gray flannel layering his gray shirt. Billy hadn’t ever seen him like this, in colors, however faded. He proffered the long glass bottle of amber liquid to Billy and Billy took it- hesitated. “I can’t remember the last time I drank...how old would you say I was if you had to guess?”

Dean squinted at him a little. “Old enough to drink.”

“I’m serious. Like, ballpark range?”

“I don’t know...Twenty seven? Thirty? Younger maybe…” his eyes traveled over Billy’s naked torso, “maybe older. Why?”

Billy had his elbows on the table. He dropped his face into his hands and dragged them back across it as he blew out an exhale. “I just have no concept of time.”

“Look at it this way: you look pretty good for almost fifty.”

Billy laughed and shook his head. He took a sip of whiskey and the burn brought back memories like a long forgotten dream. He focused on Dean, on the way his long fingers rotated the heavy glass in front of him, on the slant of his stubbled jaw, and the hard line of his mouth, a mouth which could have been full lipped and sensual if it hadn’t been schooled by sternness. “Thanks,” Billy said.

“Don’t worry ‘bout it.” 

Dean must have thought he was talking about the food. “No, I mean, thank you for saving me."

Dean raised an eyebrow. “You don’t need to thank me. Right place, right time. We helped each other.” 

“I’d still be there if I hadn’t run into you.”

“Sometimes things work out I guess.”

“Maybe...” 

Dean let him ruminate in silence for a minute before he interrupted him. “ _Don’t,_ ” he said, making Billy look.

Billy hadn’t realized he was staring off into the void.

“I can see you doing it,” Dean told him. “You’re trying to connect the dots. Trying to find a way to twist it around- because things don’t just work out sometimes. Don’t do that. Not right now.”

Billy tried to speak but Dean cut him off-

“And I know what you’re gonna say: how can I trust you? How do I know you’re not one of them - whoever _they_ are. Just don’t.” He shook his head.

Billy closed his eyes for a second but opened them again remembering the darkness was not his friend. He wanted to believe Dean. He felt Dean’s hand close around his forearm unexpectedly with a reassuring tightness before he let go. Billy missed the momentary contact immediately. He looked down at where Dean’s hand had been and felt the rise of long uninvited emotion welling up inside of him. It was almost a relief to feel something even though it wasn't pleasant.

“When that thing took me…” he hadn’t told Dean this before, “I was nineteen and I had... _no one_.” His voice was hoarse and staggered as he spoke. He didn’t know why he was telling him this now. “I didn’t even know how alone I was until it all...until...until I realized no one was going to come for me. Not a single person tried to help me. Not my family. Not my friends.” He ground out in anger- "They left me to die. _Everyone.”_ He met Dean’s gaze again and looked away when a single tear escaped in a hot spill down his own cheek. 

Dean was silent. His gaze unwavering. Expression unreadable.

"I was so scared,” Billy confessed in a quiet voice. He let his head drop back into his hand. “Sorry,” he muttered and felt Dean's hand return to his arm again. After a moment Billy slid his arm away until his hand met Dean’s and grasped it clumsily. Dean’s hand covering his, he closed his fingers into a fist with Dean’s fingers trapped between his own. His grip was bruising but he didn’t let go and Dean didn’t try to pull away.

“I wish I could say _‘life’s a bitch’_ but I’m not so sure this is technically living,” Dean admitted. 

Billy didn’t raise his head from his hand and the minutes ticked by uncounted. They sat there, not letting go until the contact of their hands no longer burned. Dean’s only move was to raise the bottle to his lips once with his free hand. Billy finally raised his head and dragged the bottle over to his side. His hand loosening its water tight grasp on Dean, his fingers unconsciously feather light across Dean’s skin. “We’re okay here, right?” His voice was steady again.

“Never had any problems yet.”

"Too bad you brought me here then," Billy said with bitter humor. 

Dean admonished him with a look but didn't say anything.

Although the solitary company of one another was now routine the silence of the bunker was not. Billy stood up, not sure where he was going to go. He found Dean’s eyes somewhere near his navel when he looked at him and they were slow to rise. He had seen Dean give him looks like those before, but never so languorous, never clinging to his skin like now. It never meant anything... 

He realized very suddenly that he wanted Dean. Every night before had been survival and attraction was of less than secondary importance. He had obliquely noted Dean’s plausible good looks but more important was their ability to function together and survive. Attraction hadn’t mattered. Here in the stillness, seemingly truly alone together with no impending threats he was able to finally see Dean as a man and not just a survivor. And maybe Dean was seeing him too.

“Do you want to go outside?” Dean was picking up on what Billy had wondered himself. Did he feel trapped in here? Did he want to see what it was like on the outside? 

“I’m not sure I’m ready.” It felt like waiting in the wings between acts. If he went out now the calm intermission would be over.

“Me either.”

“Show me around?”

“...Yeah, okay.”

Dean took him to the library, the shooting range, showed him Sam’s homemade gym, he was allowed to use it, Dean said. Dean showed him the safe room, although the whole building was made up to be like one giant safe room according to the hunter.

“This place is like a factory hotel,” Billy said.

“Thirty two rooms. No electricity bill.”

Then Dean showed him the garage. 

For the first time Billy felt like he was living in the moment again, at least a little.

Dean stood at the end of the garage the size of a small hangar and watched him, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a drink he’d finally put in a glass, as Billy wandered, still shirtless, down the row of vehicles and touched each one just to feel the smooth paint. One from the turn of the century, a fifties automobile the color of chartreuse absinthe, another fire apple red convertible, each with haunted histories and some that had simply been there forever and no one knew their story. There were also three motorcycles lined up by age. “That’s my baby,” Dean said as Billy passed a clean black Impala. 

“Where’s this from?” Billy stopped in front of an ancient looking black stage coach that looked like it had been plucked right off a street in Victorian London.

“I got no clue why that’s here. Could be Jack the Ripper’s for all we know.”

Billy decided not to touch that one.

Weariness revisited him as they made it back into the main hallway. “Think I might hit the sack,” he told Dean. It was actual evening now, regardless of the fact he had only woken up a few hours prior.

“Yeah,” Dean said with a pat on the shoulder and left him there outside the room he had slept in.

Something woke Billy. Startling him awake before he understood that he had fallen asleep. The echo of something resided in his subconscious and he lay still and listened. He had left his door open for almost childlike reasons that were no longer childish. The darkness, the solitude, the claustrophobia- it was hard to let go of consciousness freely. 

After a moment he heard water running down the hall. The feeling of overwhelming disorientation and not knowing what time it was compelled him out of bed and he went to the doorway. He could see a few doors down across the hall Dean was in the bathroom, the door open. He was leaning over the sink with water droplets running down his face and into the basin. Billy knew that was what had awoken him. A yell, a nightmare, the word _‘No’_ cried out in the back of his mind. Dean moved away from the mirror where Billy couldn’t see him and then he turned off the bathroom light and walked out. 

He had to pass Billy to go back to his room. He saw him standing there leaning in the doorway soon. Dean was no longer in the daytime clothes he’d worn so briefly, just a shirt and boxers. 

“You okay?” Billy asked.

“Yeah,” Dean said flatly, clearly anything but okay.

“Not to sound like a broken record, but what time is it?”

Dean stopped in front of him. That hardness in him was gone, dragged out of him by sleep and whatever hunted him in his dreams. He simply looked tired and more vulnerable than Billy had seen him look until now.

“It makes it weirder when I can’t tell how long I’ve been asleep, ya know?”

“You can take the clock in my room. I got a phone. I don’t really need it.”

Billy followed him down to his room, whether Dean had intended him to come along didn’t seem to matter, and he stopped outside the dark doorway of the bedroom as the shadows swallowed Dean up inside. When Dean came back he held out a small simple alarm clock, wireless and battery operated. Billy looked at its face. It was just after midnight. His fingers touched Dean’s and the act was meaningless at first but the hesitant retreat of their hands was not.

He wasn’t sure what Dean saw when he looked at him. The cut above his left brow was healing into a clean red scar, his hair was too long, the circles under his eyes too livid still. He was a long way off from that teenager in Hawkin’s. Dean’s own hair was tousled from sleep and his face was drawn, yet Billy found him attractive still. He didn’t want to leave. He didn’t want to go back to the empty room that belonged to no one. He didn’t want to burden Dean with his worries but they came out anyway.“What if this... really all just is in my head?”

Dean gave him that long steady gaze, the intensity of it was something that Billy had been forced to get used to. Something he felt naked without at times now. 

“It’s never this quiet in my head.”

The admission made Billy’s chest ache. He looked at Dean until the looking became something unmistakable and a question formed in Dean’s eyes, and he moved a little closer, braver now than he had ever been for all that he had been through, he reached out and touched Dean’s cheek. Dean raised a sleepy eyebrow but didn’t flinch at his touch. He had seemed removed from the present but was coming awake to it, his eyes flickered towards Billy’s hand, face turning until Billy’s thumb traced the corner of his mouth…

But his reaction wasn’t what Billy had expected. Whatever he had expected. He hadn’t predicted the shine that Dean’s eyes took on or the way his expression broke open with jagged edges in front of Billy. 

Dean's figure was stark against the backdrop of the room behind him, the only thing illuminated. Billy would disappear inside with him. He would let the dark swallow him up if Dean was beside him. Dean still hadn’t pulled away and the redness of his eyes, the tortured look in his face, was enough to turn his yearning into an overwhelming need- a need to make it alright somehow. Taking that step over the threshold he moved in and held Dean’s face in both of his hands as he brought his lips to his.

There was no way to describe _why_ the wayward tears staining Dean’s face were there, but Billy understood them nonetheless, he understood them in a way that wasn't meant for words. He came up against Dean as if against a stone wall. Dean didn’t kiss him back. Not when Billy kissed him, not when he slid his hand up over Dean’s chest and wrapped his arm around his shoulders, not when Billy pulled back to leave the smallest whisper of a space between their mouths. But with the palm of one hand against Dean’s jaw and his body neatly stacked against Dean’s, the second time he kissed him the other man found the bare skin of his hips with hesitant fingers and leaned into Billy.

He kissed Billy with a long anguish, not the roving movement of quick wanton lips, but a singular all consuming press of his mouth against Billy’s. He held his breath until he had to release it and broke away to draw in another, his eyes were shut, and his brow creased in an expression not unlike pain.

Billy’s heart quickened with pleasure for what felt like the first time instead of defense. Now that Dean had let him in he pressed on, allowing passion to lead him. Passion. Not something he had felt in ages, blood lust yes, but not passion. 

As they moved back into the room together Dean closed the door and turned on the light, just one, a low glowing light made out to be the impression of an old gas lamp. Billy would have been fine with touching Dean here in the dark but this was better, he could see him. He grabbed the bottom of Dean’s shirt and stripped it from him without haste, finding the body beneath it smooth with only a warding tattooed on the left side of his chest, about the same size as the tattoo on Billy’s shoulder. His fingers crept into the waist of Dean’s boxers and worked them down his thighs without permission and once they’d hit the floor he took off his own pants. Dean went willingly onto the bed with him, crawling into the middle of the full sized mattress Billy laid out on his back and skimmed his fingers over his own chest looking up at Dean until Dean slid over him, his body hot in the cool room.

Billy might have been aroused but it was not the thing at the forefront of experiencing the other man. More than physically the emotion was almost unbearable. Years of loneliness and suffering had cast over them a stony layer and the act of embracing was something nearly surgical in depth, it cut through that casting, breaking the mold, making them anew. 

They were both still healing physically and even more so mentally. The body knew how to heal itself without instruction but the mind required something more; their wounds hadn't scarred, hadn’t closed yet, and they bled into one another where barriers should have been. With careful fingers, like digging out a bullet, Dean pulled feelings from his body that had been buried forever.

It was...difficult. Billy hadn’t anticipated that allowing someone close like this might shake him -but it was Dean. And Billy wanted _him_. He wanted Dean to fill the places where horrible things had been, to seep into him and heat the cold strange corners Billy didn’t want to look at.

His arm was under Billy’s neck as he kissed him and Billy moved against him at his body's will, in a slow hypnotic rhythm they rocked and pulsed together. Their calloused hands roaming over sore muscles felt more like silk on glass; the smoothness of touch heightened to something that didn’t catch.

The lighting left their skin a soft golden shade and created pools of shadow in dips and hallows made of bone and flesh.

The arousal that at first hadn’t pronounced itself flared up, coaxed out by the delicious kneading and stroking until they were fastened together hungrily, searching for the right friction between them. Billy rolled over onto Dean allowing him to lay there at the mercy of Billy’s sinuous body, an unspoken agreement between them that they wouldn’t use their hands, not for that, for everywhere else, but not that. It had been a long time for them both and now the pleasure was too keen to be stroked out with quick greedy fingers- although he wanted Dean’s fingers; those fingers that had pulled the trigger, held the knives, strangled, murdered, bled for things a hundred times over- he sucked them into his mouth as Dean arched against him.

When he stared down into Dean’s eyes he saw that torment there still as if this were something happening to him and not something he was partaking in, although he moved more than willingly and his hands roamed over Billy with the servility that all his actions contained. Despite that stubborn guilt, or pain, that Billy could see -Dean's pupils were large and black at the center of it and he stared at Billy like he couldn’t look away. Like this was a battle he needed to lose. Maybe in the same way that Billy needed Dean to possess him.

In the end Dean took them over the edge, rolling onto Billy, digging his arms under his back with a strength that Billy wasn't accustomed to in bed with other people, and moving against him with a speed and intensity that had them struggling against each other with tangled limbs, gliding against the hot seed that seeped out between their stomachs. When the spasms faded Billy was still locked against Dean, squeezing him so hard a muscle in his arm started to cramp and he loosened his hold so that Dean could move away just enough.

Dean slipped down beside him and Billy turned to him, still half entwined. He would have stayed there but the wetness between them, the sticky fluid an indistinguishable mixture of them both, was copious and they were forced to get up and clean off with a towel that Dean had in the room. Standing naked in the crepuscular light they watched each other like a dream and when Dean put the towel down Billy grabbed his wrist. "Dean-"

"Ssh," Dean pressed his finger to Billy's lips and then his mouth and Billy lingered in his long slow kiss until it drew them back down to the bed. Dean ended up with his face against Billy's chest not asking if he belonged there, and Billy not letting him decide otherwise. He eased down the bed a little and Dean draped himself half across him finally allowing the weariness that had been dogging him to catch up again. 

"There'll probably be people here tomorrow," Dean began- Billy's fingers brushed his mouth causing him to hesitate.

"I just want this. Just for now..."

"Just for now?"

"For now. For as long as we're allowed."

  
  



End file.
